Erast, I have tried Nexenta myself and think it is a very good effort and a very good OS. However, I still don't see the benefit. So far there is really nothing that could e.g. convince me to switch servers to (Open)Solaris. Debian scales well, is going to have OpenVZ support in Etch, has two very good journaling filesystems etc. Suits me just fine. zfs, zones and dtrace are great - but it's not enough to just add some great technical innovations

On the desktop Nexenta/Solaris is a good effort - not more, not less. There are just too many drivers missing. If that's so easy to work around, remains to be discussed. I honestly doubt it.

The community around Nexenta is very, very small - and the community around OpenSolaris is, well, just sufficient. It cannot be compared at all to e.g. Debian's or, on a broader base, Linux'.

"major surgery" is a bit over the top. Certainly, there are many things at the kernel level that are constantly being worked at at the kernel level. But then an enterprise customer normally has a Red Hat or SUSE enterprise edition from the start. And home users probably stick with Ubuntu 6.06 - not a bad choice.